Environmentalists spent the last month lobbying against the bill because they don’t believe large-scale hydropower should be included in the same category as wind and solar power. The amendment passed by the House didn’t make the bill any better.
Rep. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown, called the bill a “rollback” of renewable energy.
“We are the first state to walk back our commitment to renewable energy,” he said.
While there was a lot in the bill for Lesser to like, such as the long-term contracting provisions, he said he couldn’t vote for a bill that rolls back Connecticut’s commitment to renewable energy to 15 percent. Lesser doesn’t count the 5 percent of the goal that could be met by large-scale Canadian hydropower, which he said is already highly-subsidized.
The League of Connecticut Conservation Voters didn’t mince words in a press release about passage of the bill.
“The legislature blew it,” they said. “The state legislature’s vote today to retreat from our state’s clean energy goals practically guarantees that we get locked into large, environmentally damaging HydroQuebec power to flood our energy market and damage the growing industry that creates jobs related to clean, renewable power in Connecticut”

This is common thinking in many places, with mislabeled environmentalists claiming it is more important to build locally than to acquire cleaner energy affordably. In many cases this means resisting the argument to build where the resource is strongest (solar or wind). Excerpts from recent articles show the issue isn't just about the faked concerns about the environmental attributes of hydroelectric power.

Spanish CSP leaders, whom gathered this month in Dubai for CSP Today’s MENASOL 2013 conference, were caught unawares when another potential regulatory change hit the news.
This time it was the announcement, made by business daily elEconomista and picked up by a number of press outlets across Spain, that CSP plants could be included in a planned four-year shutdown of power generation. The measure seems aimed at evening out the country’s mismatch between supply and demand.CSP Today | Spain could allow plants to shut down… but why?